——Of course I am adding to what I have already accomplished, and even filed away, while at the same time clearing out more space–for new constructions, fabricated in all earnestness, fledgling ideas barely decked out which are, however, part of the same great project of awareness, the explication of the expanding mystery of my own existence. I am a master destroyer, and fantastic builder. It is impossible to write without a sense of continuity, and a built-in cognizance of what I have written before. But the more I accomplish, the more a desert ahead of me is exposed, the greater a need for further exploration. Supremely, I show up the poverty of my own poetic images, which as soon they are as born cry out for partnering expressions. And witnesses.——Surely I must take pride in what I have managed to salvage from life, or even work into an impassioned narrative. I am cognizant of how I have foisted off on many listeners, things they later could later claim as their own. I consider these seductions as worthy efforts, in my always novice efforts to participate in the world. There is vouchsafed also a type of pure, spirited invention, gathering a sense of eternal glory, if I might put it that way–and it is as if I assume my readers are even up to date on that ambition for permanent selfhood. I position them. They are going to receive the very latest and most problematic of my whims, with proper caution–which means latent, and excited comprehension. Or even better that they may appropriately frown, when a sentence dips, when I misstep, dally on the sidewalk, turn back and merely look like a schoolboy, and fail to provide them with something carrying into the next scene.——The point is, though I operate strictly on my own terms, and at full capacity, I bring the imagined audience along with me, anyway. It’s a contradiction, isn’t it? Unlocated as all those people you carry around in your mind are, I mean scattered and irretrievable in any daytime–hard as it is to gather them, nevertheless if one should actually find these listeners, this frolicking audience, and speak directly to them–well, it would be like one were dead, or something. Impossibly beyond this life, out of this constant situation upon situation. It is not really ever to be considered that one can rally in one place all those to whom one wishes to speak. But not really to speak to, just yet. Am I putting this too clumsily, or inelegantly? Perpetuating too many an ecstatic dialogue?

Edward Williams

2 thoughts on “Master Destroyer”

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. – Horace Mann

Be aware that energy is life, save some for your kids.
Be afraid that our minds are bent by news, not books.
Be awed by the healing power of the simple purple cone flower.
Be awake before the bombs drop, before the money rules.
Be agile: live in a town that walks and bikes to work and play.
Be amused by ants and birds, goats and potato fields, lilacs and sycamores.
Be angry only long enough to solve the problem, then move on.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

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QUOTES

"I'm continually testing myself, yes, that's what it is! I keep chasing my own tail! You cannot imagine what it is like, when you open yourself like a book, and find misprints everywhere, one after another, misprints on every page! And in spite of those hundreds and thousands of misprints, the whole thing is masterly! It's a whole series of masterpieces! . . . The pain rises from below or comes down from above, and it becomes human pain. I keep banging into the walls that surround me on every side. I'm a cement man! But I've often had to hold on to myself behind my laughter!"FROST, Thomas Bernhard

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"He found by experience the truth of that law, always unbelievable and always proclaimed, that an artist is invariably hated in exact proportion to his greatness, and that if his strength gives out, when the baying pack are hunting him, he won't even find a plough-boy generous enough to refrain from stretching out his plough-share to trip him up. The Great Holiday of mankind is to see the death of whatever does not seem mortal."THE WOMAN WHO WAS POOR(1897) Leon Bloy